Many business entities provide customer support services to ensure higher customer satisfaction. Indeed, certain business entities sometimes differentiate themselves from competition by having a better customer support service. Business entities usually establish customer service centers (CSCs) to provide customer support services. A typical customer service center hosts a number of customer service representatives (CSRs) to assist customers with their requests and queries. The business entities advertise their customer service numbers to the customers, which allows the customers to contact the customer service centers.
However, it is often expensive to maintain CSCs. Further, many customers desire support for routine queries or tasks, which do not necessarily require a human CSR. Therefore, many business entities augment their customer support services with self-service options for customers. The self-service options may include, for example, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, customer service web portals, and mobile device based applications (or mobile applications).
Mobile applications allow the customer to self-service their requests or queries using an interface on a mobile device. Mobile applications for self-servicing may be native applications residing on the mobile device and communicating with the business entity's database over a network. Alternatively, the business entity may expose a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) based self-service interface that customers can access from a WAP browser on their mobile device. A customer may use the mobile application to authenticate herself, and use the self-servicing options provided by the mobile application. If the customer finds the self-servicing options in the mobile application insufficient to address their request or query satisfactorily, she may choose to call a CSR through an advertised customer service contact number. Upon calling the customer service contact number, the customer is usually requested to re-authenticate herself. In addition, the customer is often directed to an IVR that has similarly insufficient self-servicing options as the mobile application. When the customer finally speaks with a CSR (e.g., after navigating the IVR), she often restates her requests to the CSR. This leads to wasting the customer's time, and proves inefficient for the business entity.
Given the foregoing, what is needed is a system, a method and a computer readable medium for providing customer service through mobile applications in a convenient and effective manner.